Like this:

You may have noticed in your local supermarket, coffee shop or video store an exciting new item – Google Analytics Gift Cards (beta)! They’re good for redeeming in any Google Analytics profile for additional intelligence in your Intelligence reports.

And the great part is, you can give them away to friends or colleagues who you think could benefit from more Intelligence. They’re the perfect gift for your boss’s upcoming birthday.

So why would you need additional Intelligence? For starters, you’ll get new alerts in your Intelligence reports that are only available by redeeming the Google Analytics Gift Card.

The new alerts are even more sensitive and smart. For example, a new alert will be triggered when the system finds one of your pages a little too loud or noisy from a design standpoint, or if your checkout process is annoying, or whenever there’s use of blinking, neon, non-hyperlinked text on your site.

The Gift Cards offer the new Intelligence Alerts in amounts of 5, 10 and 500 – for people who really, really need more Intelligence. They’re still in beta, but should be available in a store near you at some point in the coming weeks most likely, or not.

For most Google Analytics users, the dashboard is the first thing you see when viewing your reports. Dashboards in the new version of Google Analytics have been redesigned to be completely widget-based and highly customizable.

There are four types of widgets: Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. This gives you the ability to choose the visualization that best suits the data you want in your dashboard.

The Dashboard uses a three-column layout, and you can customize the layout by dragging and dropping the widgets as you’d like.

Metric: Shows the value of a metric and a sparkline of that metric over the selected time period

Pie Chart: Best suited for displaying breakdowns of a metric by a certain dimension. E.g., Visits by Browser Type.

Timeline: A graph of any metric over time. You can also compare two metrics in the same graph.

Table: Think of this as a mini-custom report. You can show one dimension with two metrics and up to 10 rows of data in a table.

Multiple Dashboards

A common request we heard from you all is that one dashboard isn’t enough. You told us that wanted the ability to customize multiple dashboards for different analyses.

Thanks to the new Google Analytics platform, we’re happy to give you the power to create multiple custom dashboards, up to 20 per profile. You might start with an overall “Company KPIs” Dashboard that includes the most important performance indicators for your company, then create an “SEO” Dashboard for your search engine optimization efforts, and a “Content” Dashboard that centers around the content of your website.

Like this:

Concluding that Google hasn’t adequately complied with their demands, German data protection officials are warning that web companies in the country could face a “steep fine” if they use Google Analytics.

The big issue? Google collects the full IP addresses of users — even those who request anonymity — and sends the information to Google servers in the U.S. for processing. Some in Germany, which has extremely strict privacy laws, believe the practice illegal because it violates an individual’s privacy — however, Google isn’t liable under existing laws.

“We must clearly say: What Google offers is not enough,” Johannes Caspar, commissioner for data protection in Hamburg where Google Germany is based, was quoted as saying in a local paper earlier this week.

Germany is also refusing to further negotiate with Google, breaking off talks that began in November 2009. Caspar said data from Safari and Opera browsers can’t be properly protected by a previouslyannounced browser add-on, which exposes 10 percent of Internet users in the country (Google also announced that addresses are made anonymous by using only a portion of the IP addresses).

Like this:

Recently, Google AdWords announced the launch of Search Funnels, a new set of reports available only in AdWords that describe the Google search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.

Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad clicked before the conversion happened. However, it’s likely that customers perform multiple searches prior to finally converting.

These reports provide data on how “upper-funnel” keywords behave on the conversion path prior to the last ad click. These funnels are not to be confused with funnels in Google Analytics, which are on-site funnels. These are the paths users take when seeing and clicking on your ads after doing a search on google.com, on the way to converting. They look back 30 days prior to the conversion.

In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consists of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last ClickAnalysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. Take a look at this video giving an overview of the new reports, and at the AdWords blog post to learn more.